3 Players Seek a Director For Foreign Policy Story

They are three troubled men in search of a strategy: a cerebral former college professor, a gregarious former Congressman and a careful lawyer cast in the roles of the United States' top national security advisers.

Anthony Lake, President Clinton's national security adviser, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher are all struggling to improve America's foreign policy performance and to build the President's reputation as a competent Commander in Chief amid the fallout from a disastrous raid in Somalia, the failure to restore democracy to Haiti and the prospect of a worsening war in Bosnia. A Need to Explain

In response to criticism that they are not doing well -- and even calls for sacrificial resignations -- the three have begun to fight back. But in characteristic fashion, they said in interviews last week that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with their approach; their solutions are small steps rather than grand gestures.

"Tell me of another Administration that has gotten so much done on so many issues in its first 10 months," Mr. Lake said. "The failure has been in explaining our policy adequately to the public."

As part of the strategy, Mr. Lake has begun to shed his anonymity, allowing his aides to remake his image from that of reflective bookworm to steely foreign policy Superman determined to keep America great. 'Tiger Teams'

Mr. Aspin has set up "tiger teams," disciplined task forces of specialists assigned to push through the Pentagon's bureaucratic thicket and neutralize the foreign policy snake pits of Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti.

Even the ever-cautious Mr. Christopher summoned up the courage to tell President Clinton point-blank that he has to become more engaged in foreign policy by spending at least an hour a week with his national security advisers.

When asked in an interview to list the strengths and weaknesses of the three-member team, David R. Gergen, the White House counselor who is in charge of communications, replied with another question: "Do you really think I want to answer that?" and then launched into a high-spirited defense.

All will keep their jobs, said Mr. Gergen, who is determined to play more of a role himself. According to other senior officials, Mr. Lake was the only one of the three to offer to resign if it would help the President, a suggestion Mr. Clinton emphatically rejected.

Asked today on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" about calls for Mr. Christopher and Mr. Aspin to resign, Mr. Clinton said, "I don't think that the President should even discuss that sort of thing, those personnel things."

Praising them for their hard work and for "doing well on many big things," he added that his Administration would continue to make foreign policy "with the team we've got as long as we're all working together."

There is one person who is likely to go -- Deputy Secretary of State Clifford R. Wharton Jr. Mr. Christopher has had lengthy conversations, as recently as this weekend, with Mr. Wharton about his stepping aside in favor of a seasoned foreign service veteran modeled on Lawrence S. Eagleburger, who was both a Secretary of State and the deputy in the Bush Administration, senior officials said. Sharing Strengths, And a Frustration

In their quest to make things better, the three share important strengths: high intelligence, total dedication to public service and the determination to keep disputes to a minimum. They share a major frustration as well: that the President, the one person with the talent and stature to inspire and lead, should be more engaged.

Mr. Christopher marched into the Oval Office earlier this month and he argued that the President's briefings by Mr. Lake -- scheduled every morning and often-postponed -- were not enough to insure that Mr. Clinton could direct policy decisions during takeoff rather than to put out fires after crash landings.

Lyndon Johnson had his Tuesday lunches with his national security team, Jimmy Carter his Friday breakfasts, and Mr. Clinton should do the same, Mr. Christopher said.

There was also a need to name Strobe Talbott-like clones -- senior troubleshooters, who, like Mr. Talbott, the Ambassador at Large for the former Soviet Union, would cut through the interagency bureacuracy and keep policy on course, Mr. Christopher said. Finally, he urged the President to begin a strategy of centralized message-making to stanch the contradictory signals sent to Congress and to the American people.

That means a more visible and active role for Mr. Gergen. Mr. Christopher and Mr. Aspin have argued that the image-meister should have a permanent seat at all White House meetings of the top national security advisers.

Although Mr. Lake has argued against it, according to senior officials, it is likely to happen because Mr. Clinton wants it to happen. Mr. Gergen smooths over the differences, saying: "Tony has never expressed his opposition. We're letting it evolve." Seamless in Accord, But Short on Sizzle

That the bureaucratic turf battle was disclosed at all illustrates just how serious the soul-searching has become. Pointing fingers is a Washington pastime but the members of the triumvirate are not naturals at the game.

Both Mr. Christopher and Mr. Lake were seared by the vicious infighting during the Carter Administration between their boss, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, and the national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Indeed, compared with most bureaucratic teams, the current members get along so well that instead of flying sparks, they sometimes seem to produce no chemical reaction. They have lunch every Wednesday, usually in the White House mess, and Mr. Lake has even worried aloud that the politeness of the players may inhibit the creative tension needed.

But contrary to the impression of a group of happy teammates, the policy failures of Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti have begun to expose some fissures.

Both Mr. Christopher and Mr. Aspin were said to be furious when no one at the White House told them that the Central Intelligence Agency was sending briefers to Capitol Hill to tell lawmakers that Haiti's exiled President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was mentally unstable.

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In recent weeks, Mr. Christopher has made no secret of his conviction that the White House-led policy-making process has problems, stating publicly that there should probably have been a high-level review of American policy in Somalia after the killing of United Nations peacekeepers in June. Style is an Issue, If Not Substance

Mr. Lake has told his aides that such criticism is unfair, saying that the committee of "deputies" run by his own deputy, Samuel R. Berger, can only do so much and that strong working groups under the Assistant Secretaries of State must do most of the preparatory work.

Senior Pentagon officials, meanwhile, contend that the problem lies with Mr. Lake's National Security Council team, which they call disorganized and highly politicized.

While Mr. Christopher and Mr. Aspin say they get along well, they have sharply different styles. Mr. Christopher is so disciplined that he prepares and edits written remarks even for a short encounter with a lawmaker or a journalist, so goal-oriented that he sees every meeting as an opportunity to get results. Mr. Aspin takes the stream-of-consciousness approach, believing that asking the right question is just as important as getting the right answer.

Nothing illustrates the differences better than a closed-door Somalia briefing on Capitol Hill after 18 Americans were killed and dozens wounded there in a raid on Oct. 3. Mr. Christopher came up with a loose-leaf binder of answers, tabulated according to subject; Mr. Aspin had scribbled a few notes on the back of a manila envelope.

Lawmakers were particularly enraged when Mr. Aspin asked them for advice on what the Administration should do rather than lay out a strategy, which he could not do because Mr. Clinton was a day away from making a decision. "We shouldn't have gone up, and I said we shouldn't have gone up," said Mr. Aspin, who spent 22 years as a Congressman, a number of them as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

The White House has become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Aspin's ruminations, which sometimes obfuscate rather than clarify. Mr. Lake most recently expressed his displeasure by calling Mr. Aspin in Travemunde, Germany, to demand an explanation about why he appeared to veer from his written talking points on a new American initiative for NATO.

When Mr. Aspin came under fire for not approving a request to send additional tanks and armor to Somalia before the raid that resulted in the deaths of so many American soldiers, Mr. Clinton himself took him aside -- along with Mr. Gergen and a senior aide, George Stephanopoulos -- to help him with his talking points before he faced reporters. But none of them could agree, and Mr. Aspin made the statement he had originally prepared. For One of Three, An Image Overhaul

When Mr. Aspin is asked by colleagues whether there is room for personal improvement, he pushes the questions away. For his part, Mr. Christopher acknowledges that his personality may not be magnetic, but quips that it is a little late to change.

It is Mr. Lake whose image is being overhauled.

A self-acknowledged perfectionist, he describes himself to friends as a Type-A personality who loves to fly around with the Air Force in an F-15 and finds it amusing that reporters think of him as a laid-back-professor type.

He can also be found dining alone in a restaurant on a Saturday night reading, say, a biography of the Civil War hero Joshua L. Chamberlain, and he fantasizes about writing a book about the 17th-century Pequot Indian wars.

But longtime friends and colleagues say that his insistence that he would rather be milking cows on his 140-acre farm in western Massachusetts is a smoke screen and that he is determined to go down in history as a foreign policy success.

Mr. Lake said in a book he co-wrote in 1984, "Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy," that the national security adviser "should be strictly an inside operator."

"To avoid the massive confusion of the last decade and more, the adviser should not speak publicly, engage in diplomacy, nor undermine the Secretary with Congress and the news media," he said.

But the anonymity has evaporated as Mr. Lake has begun to come out -- giving speeches and an occasional on-the-record interview and planning perhaps to appear on a Sunday morning television talk show.

His aides now portray him as a kind of stealth diplomat, regaling reporters with stories. They say he was instrumental in conducting a 36-hour diplomatic marathon with senior Japanese officials at the Tokyo summit meeting last July that helped forge the last-minute trade framework agreement between the two countries. And they reveal that he went on a secret mission to London and Paris to help persuade leaders to support an American plan for possible NATO air strikes to prevent the strangulation of Sarajevo.

When friends have asked about his sudden role reversal, he has said, with more than a twist of irony, "A star is born." A Lot of Tinkering, But Is It Enough?

In his 1984 book, Mr. Lake wrote: "Only Presidents can lead foreign-policy making. Only they can get issues resolved in ways that endure in the bureaucracy and in the Congress."

But White House schedulers have jealously guarded the President's time, doling out appointments with foreign officials with the greatest reluctance. And it has been difficult to get Mr. Clinton to focus on foreign policy issues until decisions have to be made just before summit meetings or other discussions.

That will change, said Mr. Gergen, who vowed to fit more time for foreign policy and for making speeches into Mr. Clinton's schedule. "He is an activist President with an ambitious agenda on the domestic side, and it has been hard for him to communicate to the country on a continuing basis what America's role overseas is going to be too," Mr. Gergen said.

Mr. Aspin is not convinced that such tinkering will be sufficient.

"Are the kinds of things we're looking at enough?" he said. "Are they going to make things better? Is there something more we should be doing? These are interesting questions, and I think we need to probe even further. It is the one thing I think about late at night when I'm lying in bed."

In Aspinesque fashion, he does not have the answers. And neither he nor his counterparts have suggested that in order to communicate a message, there may have to be a stronger message to communicate.

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A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 1993, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: 3 Players Seek a Director For Foreign Policy Story. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe